For many years efforts have been expended to analyze the visual significance of commercials and advertising copy of the static type, such as newspaper print, and the dynamic type, such as television commercials. Originally, evaluations and correlated advertising techniques were performed by persons considered to have highly developed skills or artistic abilities. This personalized evaluation technique has continued. Advertising and commercial analysis and evaluation is often performed by staff personnel or independent consultants employed by various advertising agencies and publication houses for evaluating the visual impact of their work product. The basic difficulty with this subjective, artistic technique is that the evaluation changes with the person making the evaluation. To overcome this disadvantage, many publishers and advertising agencies have developed elaborate interviewing and panel discussion groups for the purpose of evaluating advertising material. The advertising material is shown to individuals, separately or in groups. Discussions are conducted on the impact and impressions regarding the various advertising concepts. This group session technique is still widely used: however, it is extremely expensive, somewhat unreliable and wrought with inaccuracies due to the bias of the analysis program and the natural psychological tendency of persons to respond in a manner believed to be sought by the interviewer, as opposed to objective responses. Even though the interviews and panel discission type of advertising analysis is known to have certain drawbacks, such as expense and suspected reliability, the techniques are still employed due to a complete lack of a replacement by an objective technique for advertising evaluation. This is the basic problem addressed by the present invention and is the factual background of the art to which the present invention is directed. The present invention is a distinct and recognizable improvement in media analysis techniques.
Turning now to another background matter, in the mid 1960's there was developed eye monitoring equipment which could be used to detect the size of the pupil of an individual, the movement of the eye, and the eye point of gaze as a function of time. These locations were oriented with respect to a fixed head of an individual. The fixed head position was assured by a headrest or chin rest. The most popular and original eye movement detecting concept was the limbus eye monitor as shown in Young U.S. Pat. No. 3,473,868. These devices advanced through various improvements and modifications which are illustrated in the United States Letters Patents Newman U.S. Pat. No. 3,583,794; Feather U.S. Pat. No. 3,594,072; Millodot U.S. Pat. No. 3,623,799; Newman U.S. Pat. No. 3,679,295; and Young U.S. Pat. No. 3,689,135. Various eye movement instruments and techniques of using them are disclosed in the publications incorporated by reference herein for the purposes of background information. The most advanced technique now used in eye monitoring is the corneal-reflection, pupil center techniques wherein the position of the eye is determined by the displacement of the corneal reflection from the pupil center By using a coaxial video camera and light source, the pupil center appears bright to the camera and the reflection i This technique is now being used in the most advanced eye movement monitor sold by Applied Science Laboratories of Waltham, Massachusetts under the designation of No. 1998.
Eye monitor equipment available since the 1960's has not been useful for advertisement analysis for a variety of reasons. The information obtained by using early eye monitors was not considered to be an accurate and repeatable evaluation of visual advertising material. Further, the early eye monitoring equipment required a chin rest or head restraints, distractive glasses and highly visible equipment which would distract substantially from an individual's normal evaluation of printed material. Indeed, much of the eye monitoring equipment could not be used by persons requiring corrective eyewear, such as spectacles or contact lenses. For that reason alone, the demographics of eye monitor evaluation were not consistent with the general population. Distractions and technical limitations were believed to impose such restrictions that eye monitoring for the purposes of evaluating visual advertising material was at best a technical oddity. A few companies did initiate an evaluation of stationary print material by available eye monitors. These companies did not have the sophisticated computer hardware and software to analyze eye movements in relation to moving scenes. Clearly, before the present invention, there was no practical way known to the advertising agencies and publishers for using eye monitors for the purposes of evaluating constantly moving and changing visual scenes, such as experienced in television commercials, without obtrusive visual and physical distractions. Television commercials, to which this invention is directed, not only include constantly changing visual scenes to be processed by a viewer, but also have an overlay of audio signals containing concepts intended to influence the visual image being processed at any given time. Television commercials with interplay of video and audio programming presented such horrendous, massive information sources that intelligent machine readable data were believed to be unobtainable, at least for acceptable equipment and analysis costs. For that reason, eye monitors were, until the present invention, limited to evaluations of static type advertising material in an economic fashion needed for commercial acceptance. For these reasons, the art to which the present invention is directed, even considering the existing eye monitoring equipment, did not overcome and/or replace, even partially, the interview and panel discussion type evaluation of television commercials. Even with the advent of such highly computerized eye movement equipment, such as the new model No. 1998 eye view monitor systems, these systems had no data recording or analysis software making them useful or used in evaluation of television commercials. Even with the use of some type of stop scene input information, it was not known how eye movements could be related to rapidly moving and changing combined audio and video television commercials in a manner resulting in commercially viable, repeatable television commercial evaluations.